only by a rational solution,
for every irrational decision, being from its nature self-contradictory,
has for its chief mission to destroy itself. As long as it continues, we
may be sure that the true solution has not been attained, and for our
hope we may remember that we

"have seen all winter long the thorn
First show itself intractable and fierce,
And after, bear the rose upon its top."

We, however, are chiefly concerned with the education of our own girls,
of girls in America. Born and bred in a continent separated by miles of
ocean from the traditions of Europe, they may not unnaturally be
expected to be of a peculiar type. They live under peculiar conditions
of descent, of climate, of government, and are hence very different from
their European sisters. No testimony is more concurrent than that of
observant foreigners on this point. More nervous, more sensitive, more
rapidly developed in thinking power, they scarcely need to be stimulated
so much as restrained; while, born of mixed races, and reared in this
grand meeting-ground of all nations, they gain at home, in some degree,
that breadth which can be attained in other countries only by travel.
Our girls are more frank in their manners, but we nowhere find girls so
capable of teaching intrusion and impertinence their proper places, and
they combine the French nerve and force with the Teutonic simplicity and
truthfulness. Less accustomed to leading-strings, they walk more firmly
on their own feet, and, breathing in the universal spirit of free
inquiry, they are less in danger of becoming unreasonable and
capricious.

Such is the material, physical and mental, which we have to fashion into
womanhood by means of education. But is it not manifest in the outset,
that no system based on European life can be adequate to the solution of
such a problem? Our American girls, if treated as it is perfectly
correct to treat French or German girls, are thwarted and perverted into
something which has all the faults of the German and French girl,
without her excellencies. Our girls will not blindly obey what seem to
them arbitrary rules, and we can rule them only by winning their
conviction. In other words, they will rule themselves, and it therefore
behooves us to see that they are so educated that they shall do this
wisely. They are not continually under the eye of a guardian. They are
left to themselves to a degree which would be deemed in other countr